And Hardly One Of Them
Escaped The Influence Of The Period, The Love Of Futile Ornamentation.
Their Piety Is Overloaded With Embellishing Touches And Needless
Excrescences Of Virtue.
It was the baroque period of saintliness, as of
architecture.
I have already given some account of one of them, the Flying Monk
(Chapter X), and have perused the biographies of at least fifty others.
One cannot help observing a great uniformity in their lives - a kind of
family resemblance. This parallelism is due to the simple reason that
there is only one right for a thousand wrongs. One may well look in
vain, here, for those many-tinted perversions and aberrations which
disfigure the histories of average mankind. These saints are all
alike - monotonously alike, if one cares to say so - in their chastity and
other official virtues. But a little acquaintance with the subject will
soon show you that, so far as the range of their particular Christianity
allowed of it, there is a praiseworthy and even astonishing diversity
among them. Nearly all of them could fly, more or less; nearly all of
them could cure diseases and cause the clouds to rain; nearly all of
them were illiterate; and every one of them died in the odour of
sanctity - with roseate complexion, sweetly smelling corpse, and flexible
limbs. Yet each one has his particular gifts, his strong point. Joseph
of Copertino specialized in flying; others were conspicuous for their
heroism in sitting in hot baths, devouring ordure, tormenting themselves
with pins, and so forth.
Here, for instance, is a good representative biography - the Life of
Saint Giangiuseppe della Croce (born 1654), reprinted for the occasion
of his solemn sanctification. [Footnote: "Vita di S. Giangiuseppe della
Croce . . . Scritta dal P. Fr. Diodato dell' Assunta per la
Beatificazione ed ora ristampata dal postulatore della causa P. Fr.
Giuseppe Rostoll in occasione della solenne Santificazione." Roma,
1839.]
He resembled other saints in many points. He never allowed the "vermin
which generated in his bed" to be disturbed; he wore the same clothes
for sixty-four years on end; with women his behaviour was that of an
"animated statue," and during his long life he never looked any one in
the face (even his brother-monks were known to him only by their
voices); he could raise the dead, relieve a duchess of a devil in the
shape of a black dog, change chestnuts into apricots, and bad wine into
good; his flesh was encrusted with sores, the result of his fierce
scarifications; he was always half starved, and when delicate viands
were brought to him, he used to say to his body: "Have you seen them?
Have you smelt them? Then let that suffice for you."
He, too, could fly a little. So once, when he was nowhere to be found,
the monks of the convent at last discovered him in the church, "raised
so high above the ground that his head touched the ceiling." This is not
a bad performance for a mere lad, as he then was.
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